Archive for October, 2010

The Ceiling in the Old Louisiana State Capitol

I’m gonna do it again…even though I’m not completely sure why…you know, take a shot at getting another novel published? I thought I was safe. After Dawn on Earth, I wrote a sequel…which I like because I think it’s good, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day. Nobody’s interested…well, maybe a couple of people I’ve talked to, but far too few to give Kukulkan, the sequel, any sort of hope for life.
Dawn on Earth was really kind of an experiment, timid steps into an unfamiliar world. My brother told me it would be a chance to learn something, and I learned a lot. The problem was…I didn’t like what I learned. You see, GAZILLIONS of people write books every year; agents and publishing houses are drowning in them. They’re basically in it to make money…there’s nothing wrong with that, but new authors are considered an unnecessary risk. Actually it seems more like they consider us unnecessary…period.
They turn to established authors while the rest of us sort of languish, but the most painful part is never even getting a chance to rise or fall…or having ANYBODY read what you’ve written. Of course, your family and friends LOVE your book…but that’s treacherous territory; don’t listen to them. It’s all wrapped up in love and devotion, maybe even a secret conceit because they can brag they actually KNOW an author…however unsuccessful. It’s tricky ground, slippery, too.
Dawn rose for a while, but then it leveled off. I got lots of advice about advertising, getting the word out, hiring a publicist, etc. but it didn’t FEEL honest, only sort of dirty. Believe me, there’s a lot of dirt in this business, but personal honor is important to me, EXTREMELY important, so I said no. Actually, the only advice I took was to establish this blog. At first it was a whim, but it turned out to be too much fun to abandon. Maybe I was naive…and I consider that a quality, something I don’t intend to ever lose, even if it costs me my writing career. It keeps the mind fresh and the soul hopeful.
When I told my lady how I felt about it all, what she said astounded me. “Well, you enjoy writing…don’t worry about it…WRITE!” And I did; I wrote like hell…in my man-space at my desktop. I finished Kukulkan, then switched my sights to my Louisiana and away from sci-fi to mystery. Any of you who’ve read my posts know how much I love my home state, its people, its music, its cuisine, even its haunted memories, and I thought if I were writing for NOBODY, I’d just as soon write about something I enjoyed.
Actually, I’ve written four novels since then, happily typing away, revising, improving, getting things JUST RIGHT, but when I got into my latest, The Assassin’s Wife, I made a BIG mistake…I let her read some of it. I thought she’d be entertained, but she wasn’t. She got MAD. “You’ve GOT to get this published,” she announced. “It’s GOOD! I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.” That clearly wasn’t what I was aiming for.
I was comfortable and happy here in my little room at my ergonomic keyboard, writing stuff I KNEW would never make it out, but she was insistent. I ignored her for a while, but you know…endlessly having to answer the question, “WHY NOT?” I sent the manuscript to people I knew who were discriminating and NEVER liked anything, half hoping they would support my point of view…but they didn’t. THEY AGREED WITH HER, dammit, and I began to realize my boat was taking on a lot of water.
It’s easy for them. They don’t have to go through all those hoops, all those obstacles and rejections, all that disappointment. They think this whole system is FAIR! They liked what they read and felt it should be published…like I could snap my fingers and magically make it so. Turns out, they were even more naive than me. I kept telling them about Emily Dickensen and her way of looking at things, but they pretty much dissed my argument. They don’t revere Emily nearly as much as I do.

Bust of Huey Long in the Old State Capitol

The Assassin’s Wife is LOOSELY based on the assassination of Huey Long and set about thirty years later. There are a lot of screwy things about that event, conclusions that don’t really make sense, and I enjoyed revisiting and challenging them. Sorry, but I’m not going to get into them here. If you’re interested, you’ll have to buy the book or get it on Kindle…if it ever makes it out into the civilized world.
By far, I was most fascinated with the IMPACT that event has had on a lot of people living here, Long devotees, and Long HATERS, even those who weren’t around in those days but remain curious about what REALLY happened. A guy, a doctor, walked up to Huey Long and either punched him in the mouth or shot him and was levelled by a fusillade of bullets, so many nobody has ever been able to determine the actual count. The presumed assassin, Carl Austin Weiss, was pulverized on the spot, and Huey died several days later.
Actually, Weiss has never been formally charged with the crime, and a lot of people think he just walked up unarmed, socked the hell out of Huey, and they both fell in a barrage of bullets and ricochets. The marble hall outside the governer’s office in Baton Rouge is STILL pockmarked with bullet holes, those marble slabs not so torn up they had to be replaced. Now, all of the principals are dead, but that hasn’t stopped the post-mortem…and it kind of looks like those who say Weiss was only guilty of anger and a good punch might be right after all.

Carl Weiss' Pistol...in the Old State Capitol

Of course, you know me. I got all interested in what happened to his family after that, how they lived, what they went through as relatives of a PRESUMED assassin, and that’s basically what The Assassin’s Wife is all about. My heroine, Cassandra Lancon, who prefers to be called Casey…mostly because she HATES Cassandra and thinks Casey is a better name for an ex cop…or an active detective. She’s a little headstrong, often unsure of herself, but smart as a whip, and she gets the job done in this novel.
So now it begins…begging an agent to notice me…standing back in that field of daffodils…hoping SOMEBODY will find my novel worthy of a little time out there in the confusing and notoriously catty world of publishing. This one’s NOT going the way of Dawn…even if I NEVER get to sleep in our bedroom with my lady again! I know it’s gonna be messy, but I don’t really have a choice. Say a prayer. Angel just walked in, all happy and showering me with kisses. Maybe SHE’LL sleep with me in the guest bedroom. It’s gonna be a cold and lonely winter.

Toledo Bend

I’ve been having a good time, but now it’s time to get back to business. This blog was created draw attention to my novel, Dawn on Earth, but it turned out to be so much fun I drifted away from the original concept, writing more about things and feelings I enjoyed talking about. From the number of your responses, it seems a lot of you agreed with my decision, and when the oil spill hit, I just couldn’t ignore it. Still, it fit one of the themes in Dawn very nicely, how our failure to be good stewards will hurt all of us…and poison the future.
Maybe it was naive, but I thought if I showed people how I write and what I’m all about, it might also serve the blog’s purpose in a way…at least, that’s what I told myself. Maybe it was a tiny bit of self delusion…but it’s not really impossible. I mean, it COULD interest readers and invite their curiosity about what I might do with a book instead of a short essay…don’t you think? I know it’s a delicate thread, but work with me here. We writers LIVE on threads like that!
Of course, the book has one HUGE, built-in problem. It’s all wrapped up in something NOBODY wants to hear about…or take seriously, the rise in our planet’s average surface temperature, but in truth that only sets the scene. If you’ve read any of my other blog entries, you know I’m more about people than global threat…how we’d be impacted, how we might respond, what lasting harm it might do cascading through generations, and yes, I put aliens in, too…because I honestly believe they exist…and because they moved the story along so nicely.
At least on that one, I have a lot of company. Many, MANY clear-thinking scientists agree with me. For God’s sake, SETI was created to look for them…and has spent millions of dollars in the process. Of course, they haven’t found anything yet…if you ignore the WOW signal…but it hasn’t stopped them and I’m glad. I learned a long time ago nothing important comes easy, so I say, “Go for it, SETI! If and when you find something, it’s going to be the most gigantic news story ever broken.”
I’m not big on things like Roswell…or government conspiracies designed to hide truth from ordinary grunts like us…because the government is MADE of ordinary grunts like us…and notoriously incapable of keeping anything secret. I have no idea what happened out there in Arizona that night, and I don’t think we’ll EVER know…unless it comes from alien visitors in the future. It’s just been too muddied up over the years. I’m willing to keep an open mind, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.
That doesn’t mean I dismiss all UFO experiences. I’ve written about mine when I was a kid, but I never said anything about the second time…at least, I THINK it was a second time. One autumn day, my lady and I were camping at Toledo Bend, a gigantic reservoir between Louisiana and Texas, and she wanted to go for a ride in our canoe. Now, in the canoe I’m the ENGINE; she just sits there soaking in scenery and fresh air while I sweat and paddle like mad. It’s unfair, but she’d screw it up if she paddled. She doesn’t do it right…maybe it’s part of her plan.
We had been gliding around for about an hour when she asked, “What is that star up there?” STAR? What the hell was she talking about? It was two o’clock in the afternoon! I turned the canoe around so I could see, and low in the western sky, there it was, a bright star-like point of light. A lot of things began running through my head. Light reflecting off a satellite? Maybe a supernova somewhere in our galaxy? A plane with its lights on? To be honest, a UFO was the last thing on my mind.
While I was trying to figure it out, the “star” zoomed clear across the sky over us in a couple of seconds, disappearing into the horizon, and yes, we both said it, just like they do on TV. “DID YOU SEE THAT?” I think it scared her a little, so I’ve avoided discussing it ever since that incredibly beautiful day. She’ll probably even be a little pissed about my putting it in the blog…even though she damned well knows it actually happened.
She’s not all that comfortable with unexplainable things…and married to a guy who absolutely LOVES them. I don’t mind not knowing what that was, just like I’m not driven to find out whether aliens actually exist. I like a little mystery here and there in life, pigments on my palette, you might say…and VERY useful to someone like me who relys on mysteries like that when he writes.
Diversions are seductive, but I got to get back to the novel. Set about a hundred years from now, Dawn on Earth is about our planet’s slow emergence from the devastating effects of a world redesigned by rising sea levels and impelled by the threat of hostile alien beings. A guy who read the book recently told me he thought the expansion of the world’s oceans I described was impossible. That was surprising…why not? Personally, I think he was just whistling past the graveyard.
When I pointed out that the ice on Antartica is more than two miles thick in places, he said he didn’t think it would EVER melt completely, but I had an advantage. I hadn’t made the whole thing up; I was describing the world when it was populated with dinosaurs…and little shrew-like mammals that eventually became US. I told him fossils have been found on that icy continent, fossils PROVING it once had a tropical climate, and I’ll just bet the ice was all gone then…like an ice cube on a Caribbean beach in August.
Basically, my novel is based on the question, “What if?” What if oceans DID rise that much? How would it change our lives? What would we do with all the costal people fleeing from rising water? How might our governments change when they realized they were powerless? How would our children be affected…and our children’s children? What kind of life would they have to face…and would ANYBODY remember happiness?
And what if there really ARE aliens…and they showed up? Would they be friendly, hostile, or a mixed bag? How would we communicate with them? Would our governments impose ORDER? How? Or would everything deteriorate into chaos? If they were hostile, would our weaponry be a match for theirs…or hopelessly outgunned? And the biggest question of all, if they came here with hostile intent…WHY?
Heady questions I put to myself. My answers became Dawn on Earth.

I don't have any military pictures, so I thought I'd just post a few pretty ones.

Today I was listening to Verdi’s Macbetto on satellite radio…one of my favorites, actually, and for some strange reason it brought my acting career to mind, perhaps because it began with Macbeth. The first time I was ever in a play of any sort happened when I was in my last year in high school. We had a very gung-ho English teacher, and she decided we’d get a lot more out of the play if we acted it out rather than just read it.
Turns out, she was right. I don’t remember the role she gave me…certainly not one of the leads, but what really stuck in my memory was Banquo’s murder scene. The guy playing Banquo was the school bully and thoroughly disliked, and when the teacher told us she wanted the fight to look REAL, not just playing around, she unwittingly set the demons loose.
“Fly, Fleance, fly!” was the only line he had left to deliver after the fight started, and while, instead of Fleance, FISTS where flying…some of them Fleance’s…he delivered it, but he added another line…improved on Shakespeare, as it were. “Fly, Fleance, fly…Dammit, Fleance, HAUL ASS!” I don’t know if Shakespeare would have even understood what he said, but as a fellow actor, I’m sure he would have applauded the emotion with which it was spoken.

My only other foray into the theater was in a French play a few years later in college. Delivered in French, it was a comedy, and in this one I had a major role, actually a pretty juicy part. I remember my character had most of the really funny lines…that, and the fact that I had to run around in one scene wearing nothing but my underwear…boxers…with briefs beneath just to avoid an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction…but I learned something.
It’s incredibly liberating to make a complete fool of yourself in front of a lot of other people when you’re playing somebody else. You develop an “It’s not me…it’s the character” sort of mentality, and after hours and hours of rehersal, you come to know him pretty well. I understand a lot of actors try to stay in character even when they’re not performing, but I wasn’t like that. I was just me, but when the curtain went up, my world suddenly became the imaginary one on that stage.
At the first performance there was a large crowd, a little intimidating…until I delivered my first comedic line. THEY LAUGHED! It was intoxicating, the give and take between me and the audience, and after one particularly colorful shouted line, they actually applauded! In an instant, all self-consciousness evaporated. I WAS that character; I owned him.

I got good reviews, but I never appeared in another play. Nothing could top my success after that one. Yes, I did a few dramatic readings over the years, always in French, but acting takes a lot of preparation and work…and I was too deeply involved in other things to spare the time. But that’s not to say I completely gave up acting.
Even with only one real play under my belt, I took a lot away from the experience. For one thing, I learned that in real life emotions don’t always project the way you’d like them to. You might be really angry or happy or even indifferent, but without a sense of how to communicate it effectively, you’re lost in random and unpredictable territory.
I remember one time in the military when I was ordered to discipline a guy. I don’t even remember what he had done, but it was enough for the CO to tell me in no uncertain terms he wanted the guy shown why he should never, EVER do it again. He was in my unit, so the task fell to me, and he was actually smiling when he came into my office, the cocky little bastard.
Now you gotta understand…by nature I’m about as far from the punitive sort as a person can be, and for me this ground was completely unfamiliar and unprecedented. I belong with the warm fuzzies, not the brass military hats. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make any kind of impression on a guy I was supposed to terrify, even asked a friend and fellow officer to be there with me. I felt I needed him for moral support…but he didn’t know that. God knows what he thought.
Anyway, slowly and deliberately, I told the hapless soldier EXACTLY what he had done, how it had affected the unit, the company, and the company commander. I told him it would be easier to crush him, maybe get him transferred to a far more dangeous place, than to hope for his contrition and a complete turnaround in his military life. I pointed out that what he had done reflected badly on the unit commander…ME, and I didn’t appreciate it from a doofus, no-brain, moron like HIM.
By then, his smile had sort of drifted away, and I could see I was getting through. The problem was…I had no place to go with it. “Tell you what,” I said…in a rising, progressively angry voice. “I know you came here expecting to be punished, but I’m not going to do that…THIS TIME. I’m not fond of half-ass, wimpy punishment…not for a joker like you. I’m going to WATCH you, my friend, and at the first SIGN of another screw-up, I’m gonna unleash the hounds of hell! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
In a faltering voice, he answered, “Yes.”
“YES? YES…WHAT?”
“Yes, Sir…SIR!”
After the poor guy had shuddered out of my sight, my friend said, “Man! That was brutal! You even had me scared…but I’m curious. What will you do if he does something like this again?” Immensely relieved that both the miscreant and I had survived the ordeal, I told him the truth. “I haven’t the faintest idea…I was acting.” See what I’m getting at? Everybody should take a turn on the stage at least once in his life. You never know when it will come in handy.

Bayou Teche in St. Martinville, where I learned to ski

When I was a kid, I dreamed about having water skis. We had a bayou right behind the house…and a boat. The motor wasn’t much, but I really thought it was strong enough to pull me through hyacinth-dotted water in the exhilarating spray of its wake. I was a child…and committed, but because I didn’t have two pennies to rub together, I asked my dad for some money…to buy hot-shot, spiffy, brand-new skis.
I was big into carpentry at that time, doing odd jobs for change, and dad surprised me with his answer. “No, I WON’T give you the money to buy them, but I WILL give you the money to make them.” What the hell was he thinking? I thought at first he might just be too cheap to spring for them, but it felt like he had something else in mind. Desperate, and with absolutely no alternative, I agreed to his bargin…and he gave me the money…actually a charge account at a local lumberyard.
Okay, I had to make some skis, but I had no idea how. I went to the library to look for stuff on the subject and ultimately found an article about it in a boy’s magazine. It sounded terribly labor-intensive to me…and kind of iffy, recommending I make a template, essentially a solid, curved form, and BOIL the tips for four or five hours before clamping them on, but the confident little article said to wait about a week before removing them…and the shape would be perfect.
Boiling the tip turned out to be amazingly difficult, keeping water that hot on an outdoor fire, but I managed it in shifts working with friends…finding wood to burn, stoking it, adding water when it looked like it was boiling away. When I unclamped it a week later, there it was…A CURVE, a nice gentle curve, a water ski curve! I was thrilled and we quickly set things up to boil its partner. I did it EXACTLY the same way, but when I took the second one off the form, it had a curve, all right, BUT NOT THE SAME CURVE…kind of flattened.
One had a proud and noble sweep, but the other had sort of straightened out right before my eyes. Still, they were MY water skis, even though imperfect, and I painted them, put the hardware on, and a few days later was having a ball charging through Bayou Teche. I was right; the motor was strong enough, and nobody commented on the fact that they were assymetric. I had skis…and they didn’t.
I loved those red, white, and blue skis. I know it sounds kind of hokey today, but I was a KID when I painted them. I thought they were beautiful…but the different angles of their tips bothered me. I bet myself I could come up with a better…and less time-consuming…method, so I went back to the lumberyard, got more slats, cut a tip edgewise with a band saw, slopped in a lot of wood glue, and clamped it on my form for three days…and it worked…perfect every time…MATCHING curves!
I already knew how to make the hardware for foot-holds, so I painted a narrow band of color along the edges, slapped on a lot of waterproof clear-coat, and marveled at the result…REALLY nice water skis! I made about twenty sets, gave some to the friends who had helped keep the fire going…and sold the rest for fifteen bucks a pair, WAY cheaper than store-bought skis. The word got out, and pretty soon I had a ski factory going full blast, even made a pair for my little brother…who hadn’t helped me one iota…but begged me almost constantly.
That was a wonderful summer. We ALL had skis…and I had money coming out of my ears, even paid dad back for the materials I had charged to him. I had no idea whether what happened was what he had in mind, but he seemed unusually pleased and piloted the boat for us a lot of the time…beaming and laughing like hell. We even built a jump ramp, but you had to make a hard, sweeping curve against the wake if you really wanted to get over it.
I never made another pair for myself. There was something about those uneven skis that meant so much more to me than the symmetrical new ones I knew I could produce, and the guys never teased me about them. They were the PROGENITORS, the beginning of what had become perfect in the end, and they were RESPECTED. My mismatched skis knew what I wanted from them, even when we hit the ramp, and they never failed me. I had a ball on those skis!

Cypremort Point, about a mile from our ill-fated camp

When dad built a camp at Cypremort Point, I kept them there, and spent many hours roaring through the bay on them…by then, dad had also bought a MUCH more powerful boat. It was wonderful, skiing around most of the afternoon on my odd pair, anticipating a great meal of fresh bay seafood and a comfortable night under clean sheets in the screened, windswept camp…some of my favorite memories, actually.
One day people on TV started talking about a terrible storm heading straight for the point, our camp…and my skis. When it looked like it was going to come in as a hurricane, dad asked me to go and batten everything down for a bad blow, and with Harold, our handyman, I went and did the best I could. I remember PRECISELY how I stashed my skis…safely under the camp…far under. I thought about tying them down, but they seemed secure enough. Turns out, I was wrong.
After the hurricane, there was nothing left…no camp, no boat, NOTHING…only our battered water heater standing there anchored to pipes in the sand, hanging on for dear life. My skis were gone. God had given them to me in a way, and He chose to take them back…in another way. Of course, by then I was thinking about other things…like college and the promise of a career, and what with all the confusion and work after storms like that, I didn’t even give them a second thought…for a while.
They were never found, my tacky red, white, and blue, hopelessly mismatched water skis, but I didn’t mind. I had moved on…after making enough money to buy beautiful, professionally-made skis if I wanted…but I never did. That first pair had been part of my youth, and I treasured memories of the joy they had given me…when I was flying on them…but even more, when I was making them. To replace them with PERFECT new skis would have been a sort of betrayal.
After that, I went out on the bay behind dad’s new boat sometimes…always on my brother’s skis, but it was never the same. The old pair had been part of my first uncertain foray into life, the first time I had actually succeeded at something, and when their work was done, they selflessly faded out of my life unthanked. They could never really know how much it all meant me, even though I considered the whole episode an unfair pain in the neck when it was happening.
They taught me a lot, those strange looking skis, that life can be fun, even when the situation is less than ideal, but just like water skiing, you gotta keep moving forward. You can’t stop in place…or you’re sunk. That’s what God was trying to tell me when He sent wind and fury to reclaim them; it was time for me to move along. And life rewards you when you’re willing to sweat, work hard, use your head, and stick with it. If things don’t turn out the way you hoped the first time, RETHINK…but keep at it. That’s what dad was trying to tell me when he snookered me into making my own water skis.
Whenever I tried to recpature the past behind a speeding boat in Vermilion Bay, I wondered what had changed about water-skiing. The sky and water were the same, the boat powerful, and water skis just water skis, but somehow, it felt different. It was always fun but no longer thrilling, had less joy wrapped around it, and it took me a while before I understood completely. It’s impossible to return to the past…and foolishly limiting. We’re built to look forward, to find the new adventures waiting for us in the future. In the end, I came to realize water skiing hadn’t changed…I had.